I will qualify what I said slightly -- I do recall seeing some sort of "People who bought what you recently ordered also bought..." after I've gone through check out. So, I assume some of those are based on my recent order history (maybe not just the last order) and have general recommendations. That's about the closest I can recall to seeing the regular Amazon "Recommended for you" stuff in years.
Now you are really off in lala land. The recommendations are on the same page as the products he's looking at. Noting them is not the same as seeking them out.
What version of Amazon's page do you visit? If I go to an Amazon product page, I see links to "Items Frequently Bought Together," "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." and "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed..." and things like that. Perhaps those are personalized to some extent, but those products are mostly based on what product page you're actually on and on what others have bought -- not on whether you bought a random unrelated "Hello Kitty" product.
To get to see personalized recommendations for random products, I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page past just about any content I normally would want to see. Frankly, until just now when you pointed this out to me, I never even noticed they were down there... because I would have no reason to scroll down past all the other random stuff on product pages unless I specifically wanted to see them.
I think most people, if they want to see their personalized recommendations, either go to Amazon's homepage, or they click on a link to see information on your account, where you can find "Recommended for you" or whatever. I NEVER seek these things out myself, so the only time I've seen these is occasionally when I've clicked on some "My account" link for something else that took me to a page with them.
Bottom line: I can't recall actually even SEEING what Amazon recommends for me based on my purchases in at least a couple years. GP obviously seems to notice this on a regular basis since he bought his flash drives.
So, either he (and you?) visit some alternate reality version of Amazon's website, or you're both seeking out these recommendations... because I can't remember the last time I even saw the recommendations, let alone "noted" what might have been in them.
The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.
GP wasn't complaining about advertising. He was talking about recommendations -- and he obviously wants to have better recommendations or he wouldn't bother looking at them at all. So, if he's looking at recommendations, chances are he would like to improve them -- and if that requires just a few clicks, it might actually be worth it to him.
I, personally, haven't looked at Amazon's recommendations in years. I don't care what they say or how accurate they are. If they were listing a bunch of Hello Kitty products, I wouldn't go around complaining about it, because I never even notice the recommendations. GP obvious does, which implies he pays some attention to them. If he wants to improve them, Amazon has a mechanism for doing so.
As to your assertion that regular people wouldn't help advertising companies, I'm not so sure about that. Slashdot is full of a bunch of people who never want to see ads. (I'm one of them.) I'm never going to even look at an ad, so the only thing I ever want to see on an ad is the quickest way to close it.
But, believe it or not, there are people in the world who look at ads. And some companies have been moving to a model that forces people to watch ads. In those cases, assuming I'd actually use the service at all (which I probably wouldn't, but others might), I'd appreciate a little box that says, "I don't want to see ads like this one again." If I'm being forced to look at an ad anyway, I might as well take that time to click something that will make that ad go away and put something better next time.
A good system will see it was bought only once, and mark it as an abberation.
That's not the behavior I would want. When I first get interested in something new, I'll often buy one or two related items to "try things out." If I've gotten to the stage that I'm actually buying anything, chances are that I'm probably going to become interested in seeing more (at least considering it -- whether or not I will follow up and continue buying things depends on a lot of factors).
So, no, I don't want that behavior in a "good system." I'd frankly prefer a system that defaults to showing me related products to the more unusual products I've purchased, since I'm less likely to know what is popular among things I haven't bought a lot of. If I'm already ordering a dozen things per year in one category, chances are that I already know it pretty well, and I'm going to find the things I want whether I see recommendations or not. (Obviously, there should probably be some sort of "half-life" to recommendations for unusual items; if you order one thing out of the norm, and you don't order anything else like that in your next few dozen items, those recommendations should gradually fade.)
The key to the system is also having a button you can click to say "Don't use this one particular product for recommendations," because I might be buying a one-off gift or a one-off product, and I don't want more. Amazon has a button like that explicitly designed into their system, so, to me, that's exactly the behavior I want in a "good system." (Not saying it couldn't be improved, but I don't want your "good system" policy either.)
Find your "Hello Kitty" purchase and click "Don't use for recommendations."
Mod parent up! GP is complaining about a problem that actually has a known solution, which Amazon has been reasonable enough to implement.
GP is complaining about the precise behavior that allowed him to accomplish his goal in ordering the flash drive. Amazon obviously profiled people and predicts that the demographic who will buy "Hello Kitty" products is very specific, and most people do NOT want that stuff.
GP's argument is thus actually proof that Amazon's algorithm is probably working well. GP chose a product that would be undesirable for most of his coworkers for the very reason that it's something of a niche product. By buying such a product, GP identified himself to the algorithm as one of those few people (unlike his coworkers) who would want such a product.
Now he expects Amazon to just intuit that he's some sort of exception to that general rule (which in this case, is probably a very good rule, or someone would have stolen GP's flash drives by now).
I'm not saying Amazon's recommendations couldn't be improved -- but this particular example is very poor. And if GP wants to fix his recommendations, Amazon has a system specifically designed to allow this.
With schools aiming for the middle or least common denominator, intelligent kids get bored and don't live up to their potential.
Sounds like those "intelligent kids" are actually kinda dumb, then. Truly intelligent people find ways to succeed despite obstacles, including "being bored."
The kid that is motivated and has to struggle is far ahead in this system than the kid that is intelligent, finds everything easy, and gets bored with it all.
Yeah, you know which kid is ahead of both of them? The intelligent kid who finds everything easy but is also motivated and THUS seeks out his/her own challenges.
You've identified a problem, but it's not the one you think. If we want to select for true intelligence, we want to avoid a system where kids only respond to external rewards.
When I was in high school, I was often leagues ahead of the rest of the students in the class, but there was no point in just sitting there and "being bored." While the teacher was yammering on about whatever in math class and going over a half-dozen basic repeitive examples that I already understood in one pass, I'd be sitting there working on the "challenge problem" (which was almost never assigned) at the end of the exercises in the textbook. While the rest of the class was working on algebra problems which I finished in a few minutes, I'd pull out a calculus textbook I borrowed from the library and work on it by myself. The teacher didn't care, because I wasn't being disruptive and had already done my work. And frankly, most teachers are often happy to help kids who are self-directed and express curiosity... so if I ran into trouble with my self-motivated extra activities, I might ask about them after class. Most of the teachers really enjoyed this, because they appreciated (1) having a somewhat intelligent conversation for a change with a student, and (2) doing something outside the repetitive everyday stuff. A few teachers didn't seem to enjoy it, and I usually wouldn't bother them again... but they rarely bothered me as long as I did well on tests and handed in work. And in the process, I created a lot of strong relationships that paid off later in getting me awards, having teachers write strong recommendations for college, etc.
The reality is that in life you will come up against many obstacles. One very common one is being able to take care of boring simple tasks in most jobs. Another very common one is figuring out ways to make your job enjoyable and find ways to be creative and more productive, even if things seem somewhat "boring."
Truly intelligent people will find ways to succeed despite such obstacles. What you are describing as "intelligent kids" are spoiled brats who have been told they are smart and don't care about doing more than the minimum they are required to. They haven't discovered how to find their own internal motivation to succeed -- and, frankly, many of them DESERVE to fail more than those who are motivated but less "gifted" with natural intelligence. In the real world, motivation and being able to seek out your own goals is often much more important to success than some abstract "intelligence."
(Don't get me wrong: I agree with you that we could organize our educational system better to reward and motivate kids who have more natural talent. On the other hand, my experience has shown that those who whine about how they didn't do very well in school because they were bored generally turn into whiny adult workers who complain and don't do their jobs well because they are bored -- regardless of their natural "intelligence.")
How, praytell, did he "disturb the school" while he was "difficult during questioning" AFTER they "took Stone in for questioning" which, by common American syntax, means at the police station?
Despite the wording here, Stone was questioned at the school. See this article, for example, for clarification:
The police report suggests that the entire incident was handled as if Stone was an active shooter, rather than a kid who had written an obviously fantastical story: "While administrators, Officer Floyd and I looked for the suspect all students were held in their homeroom classes, until the suspect was located, bookbag located, and locker was cleared with negative results for a weapon."
Stone was then brought to the principal's office, where police questioned him about the gun comment in the story. He "became very irate stating that it was just a joke," and then "continued to be disruptive and was placed in handcuffs, which were double locked and check for fit, and was advised he was being detained for Disturbing Schools."
According to Aylor, Stone was taken to the police station and booked like a common criminal. He was released after his mother arrived and signed a Custodial Promise form. The charge is "disorderly conduct based on the alleged interviews related to when they were discussing the writing," said Aylor.
I agree that the response to all of this sounds rather crazy, and there seems to be little reason that this should have escalated to an arrest. However, let's keep to the facts here. Whatever Stone is accused of doing in terms of "disorderly conduct" happened at the school.
By the way -- I'm NOT at all saying I agree with the actions by the police in this situation. The outcome certainly sounds ridiculous. But just because his parents weren't present doesn't make the police questioning "illegal."
He was questioned by police without his parents. That's not acceptable. He shouldn't be punished for anything that arose from an illegal interrogation. He may have simply refused to cooperate.
I don't know anything about what happened in this particular case, but in general, your assertion about the law is not true. Minors may be questioned by police without parents present. However, what the Supreme Court has said is that police may have to adjust their standard of when to issue a Miranda warning, depending on the subject's age. The normal standard is that Miranda is not required for questioning when a reasonable person in that situation would feel free to leave at any point. However, minors may sometimes assume they must be more obedient to authority figures and therefore may not feel they are free to leave -- thus, in some cases the Miranda standard should be altered to take that into account. Minors may therefore need to be advised of their rights earlier, or offered an opportunity to speak with parents or counsel to help them understand their rights in that situation.
But there's no legal requirement in the U.S. that parents always need to be present for police to talk to a minor or ask him questions. You haven't presented any evidence of an "illegal interrogation."
I do think kettles are getting more common in the U.S., but in the '90s they were almost unknown.
Agreed. I don't think I ever saw one here until around the year 2000. I've just been seeing them a lot in recent years.
Another factor imo is that microwaves have been ubiquitous in American kitchens for decades
I agree with that too. For years, my grandparents used to heat up their water for their morning tea in a teacup in the microwave. I suppose for me the change happened around the same time I switched from teabags directly in a cup to loose-leaf tea brewed in a pot. When you're brewing your single-serving tea in a teacup, it makes sense to just boil the water in the cup in the microwave.
I wasn't saying that everyone uses electric kettles in the U.S. -- but I do think they have become a lot more popular in the U.S. in the past 10-15 years. Also, I've noticed with members of my family and friends who have asked me about my electric kettle that once they try one, they tend to use it regularly (unlike a lot of other kitchen gadgets).
I don't know if you also remember this, but there was a fad back in the 1990s for "iced tea makers," which were essentially like a drip coffee maker, except the tea would drip into a large pitcher over ice. (They're still around, though I don't know how popular they are.) Americans may not, as a whole, drink as much hot tea as some other countries, but they certainly drink a LOT of iced tea. I think one of my initial rationales for trying an electric water kettle myself is because I realized I could use it to brew iced tea too on hot days, without paying for a dedicated gadget.
I don't think I ever saw an electric kettle in the US. People who drink coffee make it in a coffee pot, and people who drink tea are deported to Europe.
I know you're sort of joking here, but I think it may depend on you and your group of friends. I use an electric water kettle daily -- it's one of the most useful devices in my kitchen.... particularly on hot summer days when you don't want to inefficiently heat up the whole kitchen with wasted gas heat or poorly-sized electric elements on your stove just to boil water when you can do it in a small insulated container. Also, it shuts off automatically at the right temperature, so I don't need to come running to shut off the stove with some high-pitched whistle blowing.
Many (most?) of the people I know seem to have them in their kitchens. I switched when I first saw a very cheap one in a catalog maybe 15 years ago, and I have only used my stovetop kettle a few times per year since. (Yes, I'm American, and I'm talking about Americans who live in the use, not immigrants.)
Also, many of the Americans I know who actually care about the flavor of their coffee prefer to make it in a French press. I'm not a regular coffee drinker, but that's about the only way I make it at home these days when I do. But I agree with you that most people in the U.S. do tend to use drip coffee pots, and for that matter many Europeans will make "stovetop espresso" in their Bialetti rather than using a French press (and thus may not use an electric kettle to brew coffee).
Actually, most of the Americans I know who don't care that much about coffee flavor seem to have moved on from "coffee pots" into the world of single-serving wasteful expensive options like K-cups, which are effectively an "electric kettle" combined with a pump. I feel like in the past few years, when I'm visiting someone, that's often the option I'm given for coffee -- either a French press (for coffee fanatics), or "you can choose whatever flavor you want because we have a Keurig." (I can understand the convenience, but the per-cup cost is insane -- it often comes out to greater than $50 per pound, often for pretty cheap crappy ground coffee.)
A petition with 13 signatures is not worth mentioning. Any idiot can set one up.
You mean any idiot with 12 idiot friends.
You make it sound like the new testamant.
Nah, that's not quite accurate. For the New Testament, you'd need any idiot with 11 idiot friends and one guy pretending to be his friend while actually plotting to kill him.
I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination.
Yeah, this kind of stuff has been around a long time. I was somewhat active in the early days of Wikipedia, especially 2004-06 or so, and there would be these sorts of arguments all the time.
Back then, you'd have editors asserting that entire major academic subdisciplines didn't exist and try to go on a deletion spree. Thankfully, someone would eventually come along and be like, "Uh, I can cite a couple dozen journals that publish hundreds of pages on this stuff every year."
I've never understood the deletionist argument. It's one of many, many reasons I stopped trying to edit Wikipedia a long time ago. Somehow the world is a better place if we have a page on everyone's favorite episode of some obscure television show, but dare to include some other thing and it's "not notable." Notability is fundamentally broken on Wikipedia (as are a bunch of other things).
But think about it -- Wikipedia is a self-selecting bureaucratic community. The only people who stick around long are people used to arguing about nonsense policies, and thus it becomes self-reinforcing. Things like X aren't "notable" because the policy says they aren't notable, and the policy is arbitrated and modified by people like us, so... well, why not just say, "We don't want X here."
Of course, it's not that simple -- and I don't think most Wikipedia editors are actually trying to censor anything. But lots of important stuff can get caught in this weird feedback loop that "obviously it isn't notable" because, well nothing else like it is notable, because, well, our policies exclude those things, because, well, we designed the policies, because, well, people like us will always tend to write policies like that, but, well, we have to follow the policies.
The thing I've never quite understood is why deleted pages aren't archived. That tells you right away that the deletionist folks are obviously up to no good. Everything else is always archived on Wikipedia, and there are talk page debates that go on and on and on (if you want nerdy flame-worthy entertainment for an entire afternoon, someday go and read the talk page archive for "centrifugal force").
But for some reason we can't archive deleted pages. Why the heck not? Are we afraid that someone might come along again and argue that it shouldn't be deleted? Well, everybody else on Wikipedia argues continuously about sections of articles that have been reworded or links that were added or deleted or whatever -- and these arguments happen repeatedly. But for some reason, deletion is more-or-less final. There doesn't ever seem to be the idea that, "Hey, maybe we don't actually have enough qualified editors to FIND the notable stuff about this topic, and maybe we shouldn't permanently delete everything in case it turns out to have some good information, so people don't have to start over again and write the whole thing up again."
It's all weird. It's a weird place. And deletion policies are probably the most ridiculous thing they have.
Unfortunately for your position, the courts have always provided interpretation to the Constitution, and many instances of limits on the defined words of the Constitution are found in law.
This is true.
If you want to get all strict-constructionist on this matter though, planes, cars, buses, and rail didn't even exist when the Constitution was written, so one could argue that there's no Constitutional protection when travelling by anything beyond horseback, carriage, or walking.
WHAAA??!! Where did this non sequitur come from??
Look -- I'm all for the "technology sometimes might change the way we need to interpret rights thing" -- I don't think the Framers meant that we get to have our own personal nuclear warheads just because we have "the right to bear arms," for example.
But you've made a complete non sequitur here. The Fourth Amendment, which is what's at issue here, says the following:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I don't see ANYTHING there that mentions a mode of travel. It says you get to be "secure" in your "person" as well as your "papers" and "effects." There's no implication that any of those rights would be forfeited depending on whether you were travelling, sitting in your house, or walking down the street.
To say that you should forfeit that right simply to board an airplane because airplanes didn't exist at the time of the Constitution is like saying I also forfeit that right when I walk out my front door because the type of concrete mixture in my sidewalk and the breed of grass grown on my lawn didn't exist at the time of the Constitution either. Perhaps I can't even get protection in my house either if I'm wearing shoes or socks, since I'm using the novel rubber-blend sole shoes and the nylon socks to "travel" around my house.
This is preposterous. Travel has no mention -- nothing in the Fourth Amendment. You might as well say you lose your freedom of speech while reading your Kindle, because Kindles didn't exist when the Constitution was written. Or we can quarter soldiers in your house if you ate a Big Mac today, because Big Macs weren't invented when the Constitution was written.
Those things would have as much to do with those rights as some new method of travel would have to do with a right against unnecessary searches.
our society realized that it wasn't gonna work to let the airlines be in charge of security.
Completely and utterly false. "Our society" didn't realize anything. Our government realized that this was a great place for a power grab. And there have been no studies done since that have shown the TSA is more effective than the private airline searches were -- between flaws in equipment and flaws in TSA employees who miss things, EVERY single test given the TSA has generally failed to prevent huge amounts of contraband.
And somehow, despite your implication that the Constitution could have evolved over 200+ years in the Fourth Amendment, it hadn't very much at all. The explicit prohibition against "general warrants" (which was the main reason the Fourth Amendment was written -- to prevent blanket searches and seizures, hence requirements of probable cause, specified person, place, or things) held strong until 2001.
The exceptions to that amendment before 2001 were very small and circumscribed. At airports, previous searches of persons were minimal (only a metal detector, to avoid huge weapons), and they were run by private companies as a condition of using the facilities of their company. (The Constitution doesn't require private companies to provide yo
> Under Obama, for example, a former Monsanto Exec became the head of the FDA.
Can you do a fact check on that one please?
Seriously? This is NOT a hard thing to find out. The guy's name is Michael Taylor, and he's been bouncing back and forth between Monsanto lobbyist or executive, the FDA, and the USDA for decades. Of course, on his official FDA page, you need to read to the very last sentence to find out that he was tied to Monsanto. (I'll have to give them a little credit for mentioning it at all.) I mean, really -- this is a pretty high profile thing. There's even a petition with over 463,000 signatures online to get this guy removed.
You're right about one thing, though -- he never actually became "head" of the FDA, if by which you mean the actual "Commissioner of Food and Drugs." He was only appointed as "Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner." So I guess he wasn't the head of the FDA -- but he was chosen for a top position, just one of the top guys who had the most influence and input to the head of the FDA.
I know nothing about this guy's personal policies or integrity or whatever. But I do agree that this guy is a perfect example of the "revolving door" of some dude working for a big corporation, then going to a government agency which is supposed to regulate that corporation, then back to the corporation, then back to the government, etc. And whether this guy is good or evil or whatever, that general trend is a bad one.
Also, I thought that it was the Yarkovsky effect, not YORP, that changes trajectories.
You may be right -- I've heard of the Yarkovsky effect before, but I'm not sure I've heard of YORP before I read this. The way the wording is done in TFA, it certainly sounds possible that he's just conflating Yarkovsky and YORP into one thing:
The infrared photons it emits when itâ(TM)s warm carry away a teeny tiny bit of momentum, and they act pretty much like an incredibly low-thrust rocket. Over many years, this can change both the rotation of the asteroid as well as the shape of its orbit.
You seem to know more about this than I do, but it does sound like TFA may be lumping all these small effects of photons on motion into one thing and calling it "YORP effects."
The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination.
A chicken can be food. A chicken can produce food. Food is one of the basic needs of humans. Therefore, a chicken is about as close as one can get to "inherent value."
Anything that provides fundamental human needs like food, water, shelter, clothing, protection, etc. has more fundamental value than anything else. If a survival situation, these are the things people will ALWAYS need. Pretending that that "value" is "entirely in your own imagination" is denying the basic fact that humans are animals and NEED basic things to survive.
Also, in a survival situation, other humans will give up ANYTHING they have to satisfy their basic human needs. So the value of anything that can't directly satisfy those needs is ultimately fluctuating, but at some level things that can satisfy them have the most basic type of value that exists for humans.
Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.
Just because value is mostly subjective doesn't mean that things don't have inherent value. The things I mentioned above have some sort of base "value" because humans will always need them.
I sort of get what you're saying that availability of something (and especially excess) may change the market for some things. But that doesn't mean that the basic items lost value. Just because I can now buy a chicken for $1 instead of $10 doesn't mean that the chicken I already own has "lost value." The chicken I already own still provides me with food, which satisfies a fundamental human need. Even if the market value for chickens may be a lot lower, my chicken will still have high inherent value to me, since without it, I might starve.
On top of these basic human needs, we can talk about things with high utility value for achieving those needs, like tools (and perhaps weapons). Those don't have direct value in the same way, because we may be able to survive as animals without them. But they may have a direct connection toward achieving our basic needs, and that also places a high utility value on them.
On top of that, we begin to build more constructed social "utility value" (what will allow you to have higher status and therefore be more secure in your fundamental needs, etc.?), currencies (which function as a medium of exchange and will, except in cases of complete social breakdown, allow one to purchase the means to fulfill basic human needs), etc. Then on top of that we begin to build all sorts of other social things whose utility value toward basic human needs is less clear -- those are the things whose value actually fluctuates significantly.
The problem with your definition is that it is based on a concept of "value" that only occurs in exchanging goods. There is also a concept of inherent utility "value" to indviduals who possess basic things that fluctuates a lot less than the market. In our complex economies and "civilized" social structures, we rarely tend to talk about this inherent value for goods, but it's there. If you were a subsistence farmer living off the land in a remote location, your chickens would indeed have inherent value to you, no matter whether they'd be worth anything to the merchant in a town over the mountain.
I assume your response will be: "But all of your made-up scenarios presume some sort of dire circumstances where people are competing for survival! That's the whole point -- value depends on circumstances." And you'd be partly right, but partly wrong. The market value of items does indeed change, but their fundamental value to a specific human need not. If I buy a survival kit that has 100 days of food in it for me, that item has the fundamental value of "100-days-food-needs-met" for me
On the other hand, 1 in 300 is pretty close to the chance of a Straight coming up without a Draw....
That number is an old estimate which appeared in the article that TFA was actually complaining about for sensationalizing things. The current estimate is more like 1 in 4000, which is more like drawing 4-of-a-kind in five cards... not exactly a common poker hand.
Especially when you compare it to the gravitational changes induces by each pass by the Earth/moon system and its pass of Mars and (more weakly) Jupiter.
Each one affects it FAR more than anything from photon pressure.
Yeah, TFS makes it sound like the YORP effect is something significant, but if you read TFA (I know, i know...) you discover that the YORP thing seems to be there to point out: (1) there are lots of very small effects that make long-term predictions for orbits difficult, and (2) one needs to do a LOT of observations to be able to predict all of these factors, but (3) we HAVE an unusually large set of observations on this asteroid (including enough to predict things like YORP effect factors).
Hence, from TFA:
They accounted for a lot of small effects on the asteroid, including the YORP thrust, the gravity of the planets, the gravity of other asteroids, and so on. They found that the probability of an impact in 2880 is about 2.48 x 10^-4, which is about 1 in 4000.
I realize that lots of people out there are idiots, and everyone here thinks that they can immediately think of something obvious that no expert doing a study would ever consider... but, you know, sometimes the experts actually have thought of the obvious thing before you posted about it on Slashdot.
Make sure that form is stamped five times, otherwise the head bureaucrat will summon the guards to bring him the form to fill out to have you taken away.
In Soviet Russia, five stamps summon... oh, forget it.
Actually, I interrupt this Slashdot joke to point out that the number five actually plays a significant role in old Soviet Russia bureaucracy jokes.Quoth Wikipedia:
The genitive plural of a noun (used with a numeral to indicate five or more of something, as opposed to the dual, used for two, three, or four, see Russian nouns) is a rather unpredictable form of the Russian noun, and there are a handful of words which even native speakers have trouble producing this form of (either due to rarity or an actual lexical gap). A common example of this is kocherga (fireplace poker). The joke is set in a Soviet factory. Five pokers are to be requisitioned. The correct forms are acquired, but as they are being filled out, a debate arises: what is the genitive plural of kocherga? Is it Kocherg? Kocherieg? Kochergov?... One thing is clear: a form with the wrong genitive plural of kocherga will bring disaster from the typically pedantic bureaucrats. Finally, an old janitor overhears the commotion, and tells them to send in two separate requisitions: one for two kochergi and another for three kochergi. In some versions, they send in a request for 4 kochergi and one extra to find out the correct word, only to receive back "here are your 4 kochergi and one extra." A similar story by Mikhail Zoshchenko involves yet another answer: after great care and multiple drafts to get the genitive case correct, including the substitution of "five ÑÑÑfÐ (pieces)" for "five pokers", the response comes back: the warehouse has no kocherezhek.
Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
No -- clearly Bitcoin has enough potential for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
There's a difference. The price of Bitcoin was driven up in the past couple years mostly on the basis of what it might become, not so much what it already is. That's not "credibility" as a currency -- that's potential value as a speculative investment.
You may not think much of it, but as long as there are people willing to exchange it for traditional currency or goods and services that's enough to keep it viable.
Again, that's not why it has most of the value it has today. Most of the growth has been because there have been people willing to exchange traditional currency for it, not the other way around.
Currencies can get their value from at least three components: (1) "inherent" ulility value of the basic material, (2) utility value of the currency as a medium of exchange, and (3) speculation due to investors and people happy to buy the currency because they think other people will ultimately need the currency for reasons (1) and/or (2).
Paper dollars, for example, have almost no value of type (1), but they have a lot of type (2), and the U.S. dollar is popular enough around the world that lots of people view it as a safe enough investment for (3), which keeps its value higher than if it were only the internal currency of the U.S. Gold has some value of type (1) (i.e., applications requiring its properties, like jewelry and applications which use its conductivity and resistance to corrosion), and it functions in limited capacity in (2), but most of the increase in gold's value in recent years has come from (3).
Now take Bitcoin. It has absolutely NONE of (1). Until relatively recently, it had extremely few everyday applications where it could be used for (2), and still there are significant problems to be overcome which will make it easy for average people to deal directly in it as a currency in safe and secure fashion. So the VAST majority (maybe 99% or more) of Bitcoin's value is about (3) -- random speculation as an investment, effectively gambling on the idea that it will eventually become widely adopted.
That's not "credibility" -- yet. Maybe someday every Bitcoin early adopter's dream will come true, and it will pay off and that value will convert from (3) to (2). But I'm not gonna hold my breath, and I'm certainly not going to go out and buy virtual "money" whose value is currently mostly held up by a small number of investors. Say what you will about the "fiat" nature of the dollar or whatever, but you have hundreds of millions of people worldwide that depend on that value everyday, and they all have an interest in keeping it afloat. Bitcoin? I have no idea who holds most of the value, but I know it's concentrated in a much smaller group of people, and I have no reason to think that they won't dump and run screaming if trust in the "magic money" dies next week.
Who usually make decisions based on "gut feelings" and aren't used to people calling them on it because they're making such decisions on things that can't be weighed and measured very well.
This is absolutely true, and conventional business wisdom says that we often need such people to "lead" and to make the "big decisions" so a company can grow quickly and avoid getting mired in minutiae.
The problem is that there's relatively little evidence that having such a person around is a net positive. For every company that succeeds by taking big risks on "gut feelings," there are probably quite a few others that fail miserably.
One of the most insightful books I read on the subject a few years ago was The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow on pervasive randomness in our lives. I was aware of many of the statistical and probablistic issues he brought up, but I wasn't always aware of how many studies have shown the role of randomness and just pure luck in success in many situations.
For example, he had this wonderful graph of 800 top mutual fund managers ranked in order of their performance from 1991-95 or something. Then on the next page he had the same guys in the same order, but now with their performance for the next five years. There was very little correlation between the two graphs -- maybe a slightly higher tendency to do a little better if you were on the "good side" of the first graph, but very slight. And that's in a profession where they even have a lot of data to work with and make decisions with. When the book began to talk about track records of movie execs who would choose what movies to invest in, recording execs, or just general performance of CEOs, it becomes clear that there are just too many stories of random ups and downs.
In other words, most of them are just "lucky." They make these gut decisions, and sometimes they hit a "streak," and suddenly they become a "hot commodity" and work their way up the ladder... often only to get fired a few years later for not being able to replicate their results... often only to work a "miracle" at the next place they work. With enough mid-level managers, there's always going to be one guy who simply gets lucky even if his decisions are completely random, and he'll get promoted.
The business world makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a game of Monopoly, where the engineers are the guys who ran the numbers on the game and write the strategy books telling you where the highest-percentage landing spaces are, strategies to buy and trade, where to build hotels, etc. And the managers are the dice -- randomly pushing everyone forward in unpredictable ways, not conscious of where we might land as long as we keep moving. And if you see companies that are going ahead too fast (like rolling doubles three times in a row), there's a good chance a lot of them will end up in prison.
The comment that started this chain did not mention humidity, so that is where the opprobrium should lie
No -- the "opprobrium should lie" with idiot meterologists who teach us to quote temperature numbers as if they had a good correlation with comfort level for humans.
Temperatures are useful in some laboratory situations, but they're pretty useless alone for humans. At a minimum, we generally want to take the humidity into account, since the amount of moisture in the air will determine: (1) how fast sweat will evaporate from our bodies, and (2) how much heat is directly transferred to/from our bodies by convection. What matters for human perception of heat is the rate of heat transfer with the environment, not some absolute number that doesn't quantify that well. (Think about why the coin on your desk feels "cold" even though it's the same temperature as the wood -- we perceive heat transfer; our bodies aren't built to measure temp.)
We already have a single number that quantifies that: dewpoint. (One could also cite temperature and relative humidity, but it takes quite a bit of experience with those two numbers to glean the same information that one immediately gets from citing dewpoint.)
Temperature is almost meaningless to me in a weather forecast, particularly above 60 degrees F (15 C) or so. It's not even in the top 3 numbers I want to know. Dewpoint is the most useful. If I want to further correct for convection effects, knowing average windspeed would probably be next. Radiative heat from the sun is another factor, so the third thing I'd want to know is the average brightness/cloud cover. MAYBE after that I might actually care about the details of actual temperature and relative humidity... but except at extremes, the dewpoint already tells me a lot of information about comfort.
What the OP really should have said in this thread was that carrying groceries in downtown Atlanta when dewpoints are above 75 F (about 25 C) will generally be really uncomfortable. Anyone who has ever gone out early in the morning in a humid climate thinking "I'll get some of the yardwork done before the temperature rises too much" and comes in 30 minutes later covered in sweat even though the temperature is only 70-75 degrees F knows what I'm talking about.
But our weather forecasters have misled us into thinking that the rise in temperature over the course of the day actually was tellilng us something useful about when it would be best to work outside. Instead, I should have looked at the dewpoint forecast, and if that was relatively stable, rising temperatures would probably not matter as much. I would look to see if it would be breezier at some point of the day or if the midday sun would be beating down on me later -- those are often bigger considerations to think about than temperature.
In otherwords, university administrators were forgot the lessons of the 60's and 70's while choosing to believe in some technology utopia.
Yeah, this is even a MUCH older idea. Technology, and better ways to distribute knowledge, and better more efficient methods for communication, have been argued to be "the future of higher education" for at least a couple centuries. Just about every generation since the mid-1800s has thought that "distance learning" would be a democratizing influence that would change everything. (Correspondence courses go back centuries, and the first distance-learning degrees began to be offered in the 1860s.)
And even then, there were already people who felt moved to defend the need for a centralized campus where people actually come together in person to learn. Listen to John Henry Newman from his essay, "The Idea of a University," published in the 1850s:
Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how they are developed at this time in the never-intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature, we must allow there never was a time which promised fairer for dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us?... We have sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.
And yet, despite the fact that we can get all of these things from a distance, Newman says -- we still need to come together at the university, for all sorts of reasons. The essay is long, and you need to read it to get the flavor of it, but a lot of his concerns parallel the very same ones being discussed here right now, over 150 years later.
Slashdot Mirror
I will qualify what I said slightly -- I do recall seeing some sort of "People who bought what you recently ordered also bought..." after I've gone through check out. So, I assume some of those are based on my recent order history (maybe not just the last order) and have general recommendations. That's about the closest I can recall to seeing the regular Amazon "Recommended for you" stuff in years.
Now you are really off in lala land. The recommendations are on the same page as the products he's looking at. Noting them is not the same as seeking them out.
What version of Amazon's page do you visit? If I go to an Amazon product page, I see links to "Items Frequently Bought Together," "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." and "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed..." and things like that. Perhaps those are personalized to some extent, but those products are mostly based on what product page you're actually on and on what others have bought -- not on whether you bought a random unrelated "Hello Kitty" product.
To get to see personalized recommendations for random products, I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page past just about any content I normally would want to see. Frankly, until just now when you pointed this out to me, I never even noticed they were down there... because I would have no reason to scroll down past all the other random stuff on product pages unless I specifically wanted to see them.
I think most people, if they want to see their personalized recommendations, either go to Amazon's homepage, or they click on a link to see information on your account, where you can find "Recommended for you" or whatever. I NEVER seek these things out myself, so the only time I've seen these is occasionally when I've clicked on some "My account" link for something else that took me to a page with them.
Bottom line: I can't recall actually even SEEING what Amazon recommends for me based on my purchases in at least a couple years. GP obviously seems to notice this on a regular basis since he bought his flash drives.
So, either he (and you?) visit some alternate reality version of Amazon's website, or you're both seeking out these recommendations... because I can't remember the last time I even saw the recommendations, let alone "noted" what might have been in them.
The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.
GP wasn't complaining about advertising. He was talking about recommendations -- and he obviously wants to have better recommendations or he wouldn't bother looking at them at all. So, if he's looking at recommendations, chances are he would like to improve them -- and if that requires just a few clicks, it might actually be worth it to him.
I, personally, haven't looked at Amazon's recommendations in years. I don't care what they say or how accurate they are. If they were listing a bunch of Hello Kitty products, I wouldn't go around complaining about it, because I never even notice the recommendations. GP obvious does, which implies he pays some attention to them. If he wants to improve them, Amazon has a mechanism for doing so.
As to your assertion that regular people wouldn't help advertising companies, I'm not so sure about that. Slashdot is full of a bunch of people who never want to see ads. (I'm one of them.) I'm never going to even look at an ad, so the only thing I ever want to see on an ad is the quickest way to close it.
But, believe it or not, there are people in the world who look at ads. And some companies have been moving to a model that forces people to watch ads. In those cases, assuming I'd actually use the service at all (which I probably wouldn't, but others might), I'd appreciate a little box that says, "I don't want to see ads like this one again." If I'm being forced to look at an ad anyway, I might as well take that time to click something that will make that ad go away and put something better next time.
A good system will see it was bought only once, and mark it as an abberation.
That's not the behavior I would want. When I first get interested in something new, I'll often buy one or two related items to "try things out." If I've gotten to the stage that I'm actually buying anything, chances are that I'm probably going to become interested in seeing more (at least considering it -- whether or not I will follow up and continue buying things depends on a lot of factors).
So, no, I don't want that behavior in a "good system." I'd frankly prefer a system that defaults to showing me related products to the more unusual products I've purchased, since I'm less likely to know what is popular among things I haven't bought a lot of. If I'm already ordering a dozen things per year in one category, chances are that I already know it pretty well, and I'm going to find the things I want whether I see recommendations or not. (Obviously, there should probably be some sort of "half-life" to recommendations for unusual items; if you order one thing out of the norm, and you don't order anything else like that in your next few dozen items, those recommendations should gradually fade.)
The key to the system is also having a button you can click to say "Don't use this one particular product for recommendations," because I might be buying a one-off gift or a one-off product, and I don't want more. Amazon has a button like that explicitly designed into their system, so, to me, that's exactly the behavior I want in a "good system." (Not saying it couldn't be improved, but I don't want your "good system" policy either.)
Find your "Hello Kitty" purchase and click "Don't use for recommendations."
Mod parent up! GP is complaining about a problem that actually has a known solution, which Amazon has been reasonable enough to implement.
GP is complaining about the precise behavior that allowed him to accomplish his goal in ordering the flash drive. Amazon obviously profiled people and predicts that the demographic who will buy "Hello Kitty" products is very specific, and most people do NOT want that stuff.
GP's argument is thus actually proof that Amazon's algorithm is probably working well. GP chose a product that would be undesirable for most of his coworkers for the very reason that it's something of a niche product. By buying such a product, GP identified himself to the algorithm as one of those few people (unlike his coworkers) who would want such a product.
Now he expects Amazon to just intuit that he's some sort of exception to that general rule (which in this case, is probably a very good rule, or someone would have stolen GP's flash drives by now).
I'm not saying Amazon's recommendations couldn't be improved -- but this particular example is very poor. And if GP wants to fix his recommendations, Amazon has a system specifically designed to allow this.
With schools aiming for the middle or least common denominator, intelligent kids get bored and don't live up to their potential.
Sounds like those "intelligent kids" are actually kinda dumb, then. Truly intelligent people find ways to succeed despite obstacles, including "being bored."
The kid that is motivated and has to struggle is far ahead in this system than the kid that is intelligent, finds everything easy, and gets bored with it all.
Yeah, you know which kid is ahead of both of them? The intelligent kid who finds everything easy but is also motivated and THUS seeks out his/her own challenges.
You've identified a problem, but it's not the one you think. If we want to select for true intelligence, we want to avoid a system where kids only respond to external rewards.
When I was in high school, I was often leagues ahead of the rest of the students in the class, but there was no point in just sitting there and "being bored." While the teacher was yammering on about whatever in math class and going over a half-dozen basic repeitive examples that I already understood in one pass, I'd be sitting there working on the "challenge problem" (which was almost never assigned) at the end of the exercises in the textbook. While the rest of the class was working on algebra problems which I finished in a few minutes, I'd pull out a calculus textbook I borrowed from the library and work on it by myself. The teacher didn't care, because I wasn't being disruptive and had already done my work. And frankly, most teachers are often happy to help kids who are self-directed and express curiosity... so if I ran into trouble with my self-motivated extra activities, I might ask about them after class. Most of the teachers really enjoyed this, because they appreciated (1) having a somewhat intelligent conversation for a change with a student, and (2) doing something outside the repetitive everyday stuff. A few teachers didn't seem to enjoy it, and I usually wouldn't bother them again... but they rarely bothered me as long as I did well on tests and handed in work. And in the process, I created a lot of strong relationships that paid off later in getting me awards, having teachers write strong recommendations for college, etc.
The reality is that in life you will come up against many obstacles. One very common one is being able to take care of boring simple tasks in most jobs. Another very common one is figuring out ways to make your job enjoyable and find ways to be creative and more productive, even if things seem somewhat "boring."
Truly intelligent people will find ways to succeed despite such obstacles. What you are describing as "intelligent kids" are spoiled brats who have been told they are smart and don't care about doing more than the minimum they are required to. They haven't discovered how to find their own internal motivation to succeed -- and, frankly, many of them DESERVE to fail more than those who are motivated but less "gifted" with natural intelligence. In the real world, motivation and being able to seek out your own goals is often much more important to success than some abstract "intelligence."
(Don't get me wrong: I agree with you that we could organize our educational system better to reward and motivate kids who have more natural talent. On the other hand, my experience has shown that those who whine about how they didn't do very well in school because they were bored generally turn into whiny adult workers who complain and don't do their jobs well because they are bored -- regardless of their natural "intelligence.")
How, praytell, did he "disturb the school" while he was "difficult during questioning" AFTER they "took Stone in for questioning" which, by common American syntax, means at the police station?
Despite the wording here, Stone was questioned at the school. See this article, for example, for clarification:
The police report suggests that the entire incident was handled as if Stone was an active shooter, rather than a kid who had written an obviously fantastical story: "While administrators, Officer Floyd and I looked for the suspect all students were held in their homeroom classes, until the suspect was located, bookbag located, and locker was cleared with negative results for a weapon."
Stone was then brought to the principal's office, where police questioned him about the gun comment in the story. He "became very irate stating that it was just a joke," and then "continued to be disruptive and was placed in handcuffs, which were double locked and check for fit, and was advised he was being detained for Disturbing Schools."
According to Aylor, Stone was taken to the police station and booked like a common criminal. He was released after his mother arrived and signed a Custodial Promise form. The charge is "disorderly conduct based on the alleged interviews related to when they were discussing the writing," said Aylor.
I agree that the response to all of this sounds rather crazy, and there seems to be little reason that this should have escalated to an arrest. However, let's keep to the facts here. Whatever Stone is accused of doing in terms of "disorderly conduct" happened at the school.
By the way -- I'm NOT at all saying I agree with the actions by the police in this situation. The outcome certainly sounds ridiculous. But just because his parents weren't present doesn't make the police questioning "illegal."
He was questioned by police without his parents. That's not acceptable. He shouldn't be punished for anything that arose from an illegal interrogation. He may have simply refused to cooperate.
I don't know anything about what happened in this particular case, but in general, your assertion about the law is not true. Minors may be questioned by police without parents present. However, what the Supreme Court has said is that police may have to adjust their standard of when to issue a Miranda warning, depending on the subject's age. The normal standard is that Miranda is not required for questioning when a reasonable person in that situation would feel free to leave at any point. However, minors may sometimes assume they must be more obedient to authority figures and therefore may not feel they are free to leave -- thus, in some cases the Miranda standard should be altered to take that into account. Minors may therefore need to be advised of their rights earlier, or offered an opportunity to speak with parents or counsel to help them understand their rights in that situation.
But there's no legal requirement in the U.S. that parents always need to be present for police to talk to a minor or ask him questions. You haven't presented any evidence of an "illegal interrogation."
I do think kettles are getting more common in the U.S., but in the '90s they were almost unknown.
Agreed. I don't think I ever saw one here until around the year 2000. I've just been seeing them a lot in recent years.
Another factor imo is that microwaves have been ubiquitous in American kitchens for decades
I agree with that too. For years, my grandparents used to heat up their water for their morning tea in a teacup in the microwave. I suppose for me the change happened around the same time I switched from teabags directly in a cup to loose-leaf tea brewed in a pot. When you're brewing your single-serving tea in a teacup, it makes sense to just boil the water in the cup in the microwave.
I wasn't saying that everyone uses electric kettles in the U.S. -- but I do think they have become a lot more popular in the U.S. in the past 10-15 years. Also, I've noticed with members of my family and friends who have asked me about my electric kettle that once they try one, they tend to use it regularly (unlike a lot of other kitchen gadgets).
I don't know if you also remember this, but there was a fad back in the 1990s for "iced tea makers," which were essentially like a drip coffee maker, except the tea would drip into a large pitcher over ice. (They're still around, though I don't know how popular they are.) Americans may not, as a whole, drink as much hot tea as some other countries, but they certainly drink a LOT of iced tea. I think one of my initial rationales for trying an electric water kettle myself is because I realized I could use it to brew iced tea too on hot days, without paying for a dedicated gadget.
I don't think I ever saw an electric kettle in the US. People who drink coffee make it in a coffee pot, and people who drink tea are deported to Europe.
I know you're sort of joking here, but I think it may depend on you and your group of friends. I use an electric water kettle daily -- it's one of the most useful devices in my kitchen.... particularly on hot summer days when you don't want to inefficiently heat up the whole kitchen with wasted gas heat or poorly-sized electric elements on your stove just to boil water when you can do it in a small insulated container. Also, it shuts off automatically at the right temperature, so I don't need to come running to shut off the stove with some high-pitched whistle blowing.
Many (most?) of the people I know seem to have them in their kitchens. I switched when I first saw a very cheap one in a catalog maybe 15 years ago, and I have only used my stovetop kettle a few times per year since. (Yes, I'm American, and I'm talking about Americans who live in the use, not immigrants.)
Also, many of the Americans I know who actually care about the flavor of their coffee prefer to make it in a French press. I'm not a regular coffee drinker, but that's about the only way I make it at home these days when I do. But I agree with you that most people in the U.S. do tend to use drip coffee pots, and for that matter many Europeans will make "stovetop espresso" in their Bialetti rather than using a French press (and thus may not use an electric kettle to brew coffee).
Actually, most of the Americans I know who don't care that much about coffee flavor seem to have moved on from "coffee pots" into the world of single-serving wasteful expensive options like K-cups, which are effectively an "electric kettle" combined with a pump. I feel like in the past few years, when I'm visiting someone, that's often the option I'm given for coffee -- either a French press (for coffee fanatics), or "you can choose whatever flavor you want because we have a Keurig." (I can understand the convenience, but the per-cup cost is insane -- it often comes out to greater than $50 per pound, often for pretty cheap crappy ground coffee.)
A petition with 13 signatures is not worth mentioning. Any idiot can set one up.
You mean any idiot with 12 idiot friends.
You make it sound like the new testamant.
Nah, that's not quite accurate. For the New Testament, you'd need any idiot with 11 idiot friends and one guy pretending to be his friend while actually plotting to kill him.
I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination.
Yeah, this kind of stuff has been around a long time. I was somewhat active in the early days of Wikipedia, especially 2004-06 or so, and there would be these sorts of arguments all the time.
Back then, you'd have editors asserting that entire major academic subdisciplines didn't exist and try to go on a deletion spree. Thankfully, someone would eventually come along and be like, "Uh, I can cite a couple dozen journals that publish hundreds of pages on this stuff every year."
I've never understood the deletionist argument. It's one of many, many reasons I stopped trying to edit Wikipedia a long time ago. Somehow the world is a better place if we have a page on everyone's favorite episode of some obscure television show, but dare to include some other thing and it's "not notable." Notability is fundamentally broken on Wikipedia (as are a bunch of other things).
But think about it -- Wikipedia is a self-selecting bureaucratic community. The only people who stick around long are people used to arguing about nonsense policies, and thus it becomes self-reinforcing. Things like X aren't "notable" because the policy says they aren't notable, and the policy is arbitrated and modified by people like us, so... well, why not just say, "We don't want X here."
Of course, it's not that simple -- and I don't think most Wikipedia editors are actually trying to censor anything. But lots of important stuff can get caught in this weird feedback loop that "obviously it isn't notable" because, well nothing else like it is notable, because, well, our policies exclude those things, because, well, we designed the policies, because, well, people like us will always tend to write policies like that, but, well, we have to follow the policies.
The thing I've never quite understood is why deleted pages aren't archived. That tells you right away that the deletionist folks are obviously up to no good. Everything else is always archived on Wikipedia, and there are talk page debates that go on and on and on (if you want nerdy flame-worthy entertainment for an entire afternoon, someday go and read the talk page archive for "centrifugal force").
But for some reason we can't archive deleted pages. Why the heck not? Are we afraid that someone might come along again and argue that it shouldn't be deleted? Well, everybody else on Wikipedia argues continuously about sections of articles that have been reworded or links that were added or deleted or whatever -- and these arguments happen repeatedly. But for some reason, deletion is more-or-less final. There doesn't ever seem to be the idea that, "Hey, maybe we don't actually have enough qualified editors to FIND the notable stuff about this topic, and maybe we shouldn't permanently delete everything in case it turns out to have some good information, so people don't have to start over again and write the whole thing up again."
It's all weird. It's a weird place. And deletion policies are probably the most ridiculous thing they have.
Unfortunately for your position, the courts have always provided interpretation to the Constitution, and many instances of limits on the defined words of the Constitution are found in law.
This is true.
If you want to get all strict-constructionist on this matter though, planes, cars, buses, and rail didn't even exist when the Constitution was written, so one could argue that there's no Constitutional protection when travelling by anything beyond horseback, carriage, or walking.
WHAAA??!! Where did this non sequitur come from??
Look -- I'm all for the "technology sometimes might change the way we need to interpret rights thing" -- I don't think the Framers meant that we get to have our own personal nuclear warheads just because we have "the right to bear arms," for example.
But you've made a complete non sequitur here. The Fourth Amendment, which is what's at issue here, says the following:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I don't see ANYTHING there that mentions a mode of travel. It says you get to be "secure" in your "person" as well as your "papers" and "effects." There's no implication that any of those rights would be forfeited depending on whether you were travelling, sitting in your house, or walking down the street.
To say that you should forfeit that right simply to board an airplane because airplanes didn't exist at the time of the Constitution is like saying I also forfeit that right when I walk out my front door because the type of concrete mixture in my sidewalk and the breed of grass grown on my lawn didn't exist at the time of the Constitution either. Perhaps I can't even get protection in my house either if I'm wearing shoes or socks, since I'm using the novel rubber-blend sole shoes and the nylon socks to "travel" around my house.
This is preposterous. Travel has no mention -- nothing in the Fourth Amendment. You might as well say you lose your freedom of speech while reading your Kindle, because Kindles didn't exist when the Constitution was written. Or we can quarter soldiers in your house if you ate a Big Mac today, because Big Macs weren't invented when the Constitution was written.
Those things would have as much to do with those rights as some new method of travel would have to do with a right against unnecessary searches.
our society realized that it wasn't gonna work to let the airlines be in charge of security.
Completely and utterly false. "Our society" didn't realize anything. Our government realized that this was a great place for a power grab. And there have been no studies done since that have shown the TSA is more effective than the private airline searches were -- between flaws in equipment and flaws in TSA employees who miss things, EVERY single test given the TSA has generally failed to prevent huge amounts of contraband.
And somehow, despite your implication that the Constitution could have evolved over 200+ years in the Fourth Amendment, it hadn't very much at all. The explicit prohibition against "general warrants" (which was the main reason the Fourth Amendment was written -- to prevent blanket searches and seizures, hence requirements of probable cause, specified person, place, or things) held strong until 2001.
The exceptions to that amendment before 2001 were very small and circumscribed. At airports, previous searches of persons were minimal (only a metal detector, to avoid huge weapons), and they were run by private companies as a condition of using the facilities of their company. (The Constitution doesn't require private companies to provide yo
> Under Obama, for example, a former Monsanto Exec became the head of the FDA.
Can you do a fact check on that one please?
Seriously? This is NOT a hard thing to find out. The guy's name is Michael Taylor, and he's been bouncing back and forth between Monsanto lobbyist or executive, the FDA, and the USDA for decades. Of course, on his official FDA page, you need to read to the very last sentence to find out that he was tied to Monsanto. (I'll have to give them a little credit for mentioning it at all.) I mean, really -- this is a pretty high profile thing. There's even a petition with over 463,000 signatures online to get this guy removed.
You're right about one thing, though -- he never actually became "head" of the FDA, if by which you mean the actual "Commissioner of Food and Drugs." He was only appointed as "Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner." So I guess he wasn't the head of the FDA -- but he was chosen for a top position, just one of the top guys who had the most influence and input to the head of the FDA.
I know nothing about this guy's personal policies or integrity or whatever. But I do agree that this guy is a perfect example of the "revolving door" of some dude working for a big corporation, then going to a government agency which is supposed to regulate that corporation, then back to the corporation, then back to the government, etc. And whether this guy is good or evil or whatever, that general trend is a bad one.
Also, I thought that it was the Yarkovsky effect, not YORP, that changes trajectories.
You may be right -- I've heard of the Yarkovsky effect before, but I'm not sure I've heard of YORP before I read this. The way the wording is done in TFA, it certainly sounds possible that he's just conflating Yarkovsky and YORP into one thing:
The infrared photons it emits when itâ(TM)s warm carry away a teeny tiny bit of momentum, and they act pretty much like an incredibly low-thrust rocket. Over many years, this can change both the rotation of the asteroid as well as the shape of its orbit.
You seem to know more about this than I do, but it does sound like TFA may be lumping all these small effects of photons on motion into one thing and calling it "YORP effects."
The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination.
A chicken can be food. A chicken can produce food. Food is one of the basic needs of humans. Therefore, a chicken is about as close as one can get to "inherent value."
Anything that provides fundamental human needs like food, water, shelter, clothing, protection, etc. has more fundamental value than anything else. If a survival situation, these are the things people will ALWAYS need. Pretending that that "value" is "entirely in your own imagination" is denying the basic fact that humans are animals and NEED basic things to survive.
Also, in a survival situation, other humans will give up ANYTHING they have to satisfy their basic human needs. So the value of anything that can't directly satisfy those needs is ultimately fluctuating, but at some level things that can satisfy them have the most basic type of value that exists for humans.
Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.
Just because value is mostly subjective doesn't mean that things don't have inherent value. The things I mentioned above have some sort of base "value" because humans will always need them.
I sort of get what you're saying that availability of something (and especially excess) may change the market for some things. But that doesn't mean that the basic items lost value. Just because I can now buy a chicken for $1 instead of $10 doesn't mean that the chicken I already own has "lost value." The chicken I already own still provides me with food, which satisfies a fundamental human need. Even if the market value for chickens may be a lot lower, my chicken will still have high inherent value to me, since without it, I might starve.
On top of these basic human needs, we can talk about things with high utility value for achieving those needs, like tools (and perhaps weapons). Those don't have direct value in the same way, because we may be able to survive as animals without them. But they may have a direct connection toward achieving our basic needs, and that also places a high utility value on them.
On top of that, we begin to build more constructed social "utility value" (what will allow you to have higher status and therefore be more secure in your fundamental needs, etc.?), currencies (which function as a medium of exchange and will, except in cases of complete social breakdown, allow one to purchase the means to fulfill basic human needs), etc. Then on top of that we begin to build all sorts of other social things whose utility value toward basic human needs is less clear -- those are the things whose value actually fluctuates significantly.
The problem with your definition is that it is based on a concept of "value" that only occurs in exchanging goods. There is also a concept of inherent utility "value" to indviduals who possess basic things that fluctuates a lot less than the market. In our complex economies and "civilized" social structures, we rarely tend to talk about this inherent value for goods, but it's there. If you were a subsistence farmer living off the land in a remote location, your chickens would indeed have inherent value to you, no matter whether they'd be worth anything to the merchant in a town over the mountain.
I assume your response will be: "But all of your made-up scenarios presume some sort of dire circumstances where people are competing for survival! That's the whole point -- value depends on circumstances." And you'd be partly right, but partly wrong. The market value of items does indeed change, but their fundamental value to a specific human need not. If I buy a survival kit that has 100 days of food in it for me, that item has the fundamental value of "100-days-food-needs-met" for me
On the other hand, 1 in 300 is pretty close to the chance of a Straight coming up without a Draw....
That number is an old estimate which appeared in the article that TFA was actually complaining about for sensationalizing things. The current estimate is more like 1 in 4000, which is more like drawing 4-of-a-kind in five cards... not exactly a common poker hand.
Especially when you compare it to the gravitational changes induces by each pass by the Earth/moon system and its pass of Mars and (more weakly) Jupiter.
Each one affects it FAR more than anything from photon pressure.
Yeah, TFS makes it sound like the YORP effect is something significant, but if you read TFA (I know, i know...) you discover that the YORP thing seems to be there to point out: (1) there are lots of very small effects that make long-term predictions for orbits difficult, and (2) one needs to do a LOT of observations to be able to predict all of these factors, but (3) we HAVE an unusually large set of observations on this asteroid (including enough to predict things like YORP effect factors).
Hence, from TFA:
They accounted for a lot of small effects on the asteroid, including the YORP thrust, the gravity of the planets, the gravity of other asteroids, and so on. They found that the probability of an impact in 2880 is about 2.48 x 10^-4, which is about 1 in 4000.
I realize that lots of people out there are idiots, and everyone here thinks that they can immediately think of something obvious that no expert doing a study would ever consider... but, you know, sometimes the experts actually have thought of the obvious thing before you posted about it on Slashdot.
Make sure that form is stamped five times, otherwise the head bureaucrat will summon the guards to bring him the form to fill out to have you taken away.
In Soviet Russia, five stamps summon... oh, forget it.
Actually, I interrupt this Slashdot joke to point out that the number five actually plays a significant role in old Soviet Russia bureaucracy jokes. Quoth Wikipedia:
The genitive plural of a noun (used with a numeral to indicate five or more of something, as opposed to the dual, used for two, three, or four, see Russian nouns) is a rather unpredictable form of the Russian noun, and there are a handful of words which even native speakers have trouble producing this form of (either due to rarity or an actual lexical gap). A common example of this is kocherga (fireplace poker). The joke is set in a Soviet factory. Five pokers are to be requisitioned. The correct forms are acquired, but as they are being filled out, a debate arises: what is the genitive plural of kocherga? Is it Kocherg? Kocherieg? Kochergov?... One thing is clear: a form with the wrong genitive plural of kocherga will bring disaster from the typically pedantic bureaucrats. Finally, an old janitor overhears the commotion, and tells them to send in two separate requisitions: one for two kochergi and another for three kochergi. In some versions, they send in a request for 4 kochergi and one extra to find out the correct word, only to receive back "here are your 4 kochergi and one extra." A similar story by Mikhail Zoshchenko involves yet another answer: after great care and multiple drafts to get the genitive case correct, including the substitution of "five ÑÑÑfÐ (pieces)" for "five pokers", the response comes back: the warehouse has no kocherezhek.
Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
No -- clearly Bitcoin has enough potential for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
There's a difference. The price of Bitcoin was driven up in the past couple years mostly on the basis of what it might become, not so much what it already is. That's not "credibility" as a currency -- that's potential value as a speculative investment.
You may not think much of it, but as long as there are people willing to exchange it for traditional currency or goods and services that's enough to keep it viable.
Again, that's not why it has most of the value it has today. Most of the growth has been because there have been people willing to exchange traditional currency for it, not the other way around.
Currencies can get their value from at least three components: (1) "inherent" ulility value of the basic material, (2) utility value of the currency as a medium of exchange, and (3) speculation due to investors and people happy to buy the currency because they think other people will ultimately need the currency for reasons (1) and/or (2).
Paper dollars, for example, have almost no value of type (1), but they have a lot of type (2), and the U.S. dollar is popular enough around the world that lots of people view it as a safe enough investment for (3), which keeps its value higher than if it were only the internal currency of the U.S. Gold has some value of type (1) (i.e., applications requiring its properties, like jewelry and applications which use its conductivity and resistance to corrosion), and it functions in limited capacity in (2), but most of the increase in gold's value in recent years has come from (3).
Now take Bitcoin. It has absolutely NONE of (1). Until relatively recently, it had extremely few everyday applications where it could be used for (2), and still there are significant problems to be overcome which will make it easy for average people to deal directly in it as a currency in safe and secure fashion. So the VAST majority (maybe 99% or more) of Bitcoin's value is about (3) -- random speculation as an investment, effectively gambling on the idea that it will eventually become widely adopted.
That's not "credibility" -- yet. Maybe someday every Bitcoin early adopter's dream will come true, and it will pay off and that value will convert from (3) to (2). But I'm not gonna hold my breath, and I'm certainly not going to go out and buy virtual "money" whose value is currently mostly held up by a small number of investors. Say what you will about the "fiat" nature of the dollar or whatever, but you have hundreds of millions of people worldwide that depend on that value everyday, and they all have an interest in keeping it afloat. Bitcoin? I have no idea who holds most of the value, but I know it's concentrated in a much smaller group of people, and I have no reason to think that they won't dump and run screaming if trust in the "magic money" dies next week.
Who usually make decisions based on "gut feelings" and aren't used to people calling them on it because they're making such decisions on things that can't be weighed and measured very well.
This is absolutely true, and conventional business wisdom says that we often need such people to "lead" and to make the "big decisions" so a company can grow quickly and avoid getting mired in minutiae.
The problem is that there's relatively little evidence that having such a person around is a net positive. For every company that succeeds by taking big risks on "gut feelings," there are probably quite a few others that fail miserably.
One of the most insightful books I read on the subject a few years ago was The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow on pervasive randomness in our lives. I was aware of many of the statistical and probablistic issues he brought up, but I wasn't always aware of how many studies have shown the role of randomness and just pure luck in success in many situations.
For example, he had this wonderful graph of 800 top mutual fund managers ranked in order of their performance from 1991-95 or something. Then on the next page he had the same guys in the same order, but now with their performance for the next five years. There was very little correlation between the two graphs -- maybe a slightly higher tendency to do a little better if you were on the "good side" of the first graph, but very slight. And that's in a profession where they even have a lot of data to work with and make decisions with. When the book began to talk about track records of movie execs who would choose what movies to invest in, recording execs, or just general performance of CEOs, it becomes clear that there are just too many stories of random ups and downs.
In other words, most of them are just "lucky." They make these gut decisions, and sometimes they hit a "streak," and suddenly they become a "hot commodity" and work their way up the ladder... often only to get fired a few years later for not being able to replicate their results... often only to work a "miracle" at the next place they work. With enough mid-level managers, there's always going to be one guy who simply gets lucky even if his decisions are completely random, and he'll get promoted.
The business world makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a game of Monopoly, where the engineers are the guys who ran the numbers on the game and write the strategy books telling you where the highest-percentage landing spaces are, strategies to buy and trade, where to build hotels, etc. And the managers are the dice -- randomly pushing everyone forward in unpredictable ways, not conscious of where we might land as long as we keep moving. And if you see companies that are going ahead too fast (like rolling doubles three times in a row), there's a good chance a lot of them will end up in prison.
The comment that started this chain did not mention humidity, so that is where the opprobrium should lie
No -- the "opprobrium should lie" with idiot meterologists who teach us to quote temperature numbers as if they had a good correlation with comfort level for humans.
Temperatures are useful in some laboratory situations, but they're pretty useless alone for humans. At a minimum, we generally want to take the humidity into account, since the amount of moisture in the air will determine: (1) how fast sweat will evaporate from our bodies, and (2) how much heat is directly transferred to/from our bodies by convection. What matters for human perception of heat is the rate of heat transfer with the environment, not some absolute number that doesn't quantify that well. (Think about why the coin on your desk feels "cold" even though it's the same temperature as the wood -- we perceive heat transfer; our bodies aren't built to measure temp.)
We already have a single number that quantifies that: dewpoint. (One could also cite temperature and relative humidity, but it takes quite a bit of experience with those two numbers to glean the same information that one immediately gets from citing dewpoint.)
Temperature is almost meaningless to me in a weather forecast, particularly above 60 degrees F (15 C) or so. It's not even in the top 3 numbers I want to know. Dewpoint is the most useful. If I want to further correct for convection effects, knowing average windspeed would probably be next. Radiative heat from the sun is another factor, so the third thing I'd want to know is the average brightness/cloud cover. MAYBE after that I might actually care about the details of actual temperature and relative humidity... but except at extremes, the dewpoint already tells me a lot of information about comfort.
What the OP really should have said in this thread was that carrying groceries in downtown Atlanta when dewpoints are above 75 F (about 25 C) will generally be really uncomfortable. Anyone who has ever gone out early in the morning in a humid climate thinking "I'll get some of the yardwork done before the temperature rises too much" and comes in 30 minutes later covered in sweat even though the temperature is only 70-75 degrees F knows what I'm talking about.
But our weather forecasters have misled us into thinking that the rise in temperature over the course of the day actually was tellilng us something useful about when it would be best to work outside. Instead, I should have looked at the dewpoint forecast, and if that was relatively stable, rising temperatures would probably not matter as much. I would look to see if it would be breezier at some point of the day or if the midday sun would be beating down on me later -- those are often bigger considerations to think about than temperature.
In otherwords, university administrators were forgot the lessons of the 60's and 70's while choosing to believe in some technology utopia.
Yeah, this is even a MUCH older idea. Technology, and better ways to distribute knowledge, and better more efficient methods for communication, have been argued to be "the future of higher education" for at least a couple centuries. Just about every generation since the mid-1800s has thought that "distance learning" would be a democratizing influence that would change everything. (Correspondence courses go back centuries, and the first distance-learning degrees began to be offered in the 1860s.)
And even then, there were already people who felt moved to defend the need for a centralized campus where people actually come together in person to learn. Listen to John Henry Newman from his essay, "The Idea of a University," published in the 1850s:
Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how they are developed at this time in the never-intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature, we must allow there never was a time which promised fairer for dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us?... We have sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.
And yet, despite the fact that we can get all of these things from a distance, Newman says -- we still need to come together at the university, for all sorts of reasons. The essay is long, and you need to read it to get the flavor of it, but a lot of his concerns parallel the very same ones being discussed here right now, over 150 years later.
If the building had to be torn down then the cost / loss would be so high that developers would never make mistakes like this again
Yes, and if we had the death penalty for theft, there'd be no more mugging!
Nah - Everybody knows that petty theft should be punished by cutting the thief's hand off. What kind of crazy extremist are you?!